President Biden is heading to Brussels on Wednesday to meet with NATO allies and is expected to announce new sanctions aimed at Russian lawmakers as the United States and its allies aim to pressure Russia from all sides. His trip comes as Ukrainian forces have mounted a counteroffensive that they say has retaken ground outside Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an address to his nation Wednesday morning that any new sanctions should be aimed at people “responsible for this war” and that efforts to “force Russia to peace” are difficult and “sometimes scandalous” but that “step by step we are moving forward.”
On the ground, Ukraine’s forces have slowed Russia’s advance, though the heavily armed Russian army continues to try pounding Ukrainian cities and people into submission.
Ukrainian forces have launched counteroffensives on multiple fronts, and military officials say they retook a key town outside Kyiv on Tuesday. In the south of the country, they have sought to reclaim the Kherson region.
The southern port of Mariupol still endured a brutal siege, however, with the government saying that about 100,000 civilians remained trapped in that ruined city with little food, water, power or heat.
Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, told reporters that, “This war will not end easily or rapidly.”
The Pentagon has assessed that Russia’s “combat power” in Ukraine — comprising more than 150,000 troops massed in Belarus and western Russian before the invasion — has dipped below 90 percent of its original strength for the first time, reflecting the losses Russian troops have suffered at the hands of Ukrainian soldiers.
Russia’s military difficulties and mounting economic pressure from sanctions have raised concerns about how President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will respond. On Tuesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for Mr. Putin, repeatedly refused to rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons, telling CNN that “if it is an existential threat for our country, then it can be.”
In other major developments:
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President Zelensky told Italy’s Parliament that “Ukraine is the gate for the Russian army — they want to enter Europe,” and warned that “famine was approaching for several countries” that depended on Ukrainian corn, oil and wheat.
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There are 33 prisons in active conflict zones inside Ukraine, local officials said. Getting drinking water, heat and electricity, to prisons closest to the fighting has been difficult, government officials said.
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Russia has withdrawn most of its helicopters from a strategic airport in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, according to satellite images analyzed by The New York Times, in what experts said could be a telltale sign of Russian military setbacks in the south of the country.
